For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Okay, now, you know what war I don't know enough about?
The American invasion of Mexico.
And I'm against war, all war.
And I'm against the American invasion of Mexico.
In principle.
But you know who knows about it?
Jacob Hornberger, the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
You can find him at fff.org.
Welcome back to the show, Jacob.
How are you doing?
Hey, great.
It's great to be back.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
And, you know, I guess probably the most I know about the American invasion of Mexico is a combination between what I was taught by my junior high school Texas history teacher and the bit I remember from Howard Zinn's People's History, where I believe he quotes from General Zachary Taylor's Smithers, you know, his kind of right-hand man, a colonel or whoever he was, who wrote in his diary, my God, I can't believe what we're doing here.
This is horrible.
And so Howard Zinn quotes that at length.
And then I have, you know, my basic heroic Texans face down the Mexicans kind of thing that I learned in school.
But I would appreciate it if maybe we could, you know, actually have a real discussion on this show about what really happened there.
And if you can start with maybe who's James K. Polk and what was the status of Texas and what years we're talking about and the very basics here to get us started, Bumper.
Yeah.
Now, again, I'm not a historian, and this isn't my area of expertise, but I have written some articles in this area, and I am a native Texan, so I know a little bit about it.
But it's a fascinating story.
And it, of course, culminated in the United States taking control over the entire northern half of a country.
And the reason I start out with that is because, you know, we've discussed immigration before and how people are so concerned, you know, the Mexican immigrants invading the United States.
Well, as a result of this particular war, the United States voluntarily took control of the entire northern half of Mexico, including all the inhabitants of the northern half of Mexico, and made it part of the United States.
Otherwise I'd be broadcasting from the angels right now, right?
That's right.
And they agreed to make all Mexican citizens in this area, the northern half, American citizens if they chose automatically.
Very few of them could speak English, obviously, because their country was Mexico, their heritage was Spanish, Indian, Mexican, and so forth.
And yet, nonetheless, the country was able to absorb this massive acquisition of land and people instantaneously, immediately.
And it all resulted from the resolution of this war that you were talking about, the Mexican War.
And it's a fascinating story.
It begins with Mexico and a province in the northern part of Mexico called Texas.
That generally speaking, prior to the Texas Revolution, Mexicans believed, much like Americans believe, in a decentralized type of government, so-called states' rights.
In comes Santa Ana and changes everything.
He simply adopts the mindset that American public officials today have, both Democrats and Republicans, of a strong central government, a strong federal government, one that would extend its tentacles all across the provinces of Mexico.
So he's centralizing power just the same way that Obama and Bush had been centralizing power and all their predecessors in Washington.
Well, this doesn't sit very well with the citizens of Mexico that are living up in the north, in this province of Texas.
And they don't like this interference in their affairs.
Santa Ana starts imposing tariffs on the people there in this province.
He starts sending the bureaucrats, the regulators, I mean, what the centralizing authority generally does.
And so there were some disputes, there were some controversies, and finally the Texans drew the line and said, no, you're not going to do this, and we're going to resist it.
And so this was a resistance against their own government, of course.
And so that, of course, precipitated Santa Ana rounding up troops to quell this rebellion, this resistance among the people in the northern part of Mexico.
That's good.
I kind of like that.
It's complementary to my Texas nationalism that I still hold, and that is that Santa Ana was a military tyrant.
He was violating the Texans' rights, as they called themselves then, and it was not quite the American Revolution, but I would side with them as far as their declaration of independence from Mexico in that case.
Absolutely.
Well, what's important is...
Well, I mean, there's also kind of the whole alternative history there, right, where the whole Texas thing was just a plot to steal Texas from Mexico and give it to the United States, make it part of the United States in the first place, right?
I don't know enough about that, really, to make the assertion, but I've certainly heard that not as just a conspiracy theory, but as sort of a certain historical view of it or whatever, a certain historical school's way of looking at it.
Well, there were certainly floods of immigrants coming from the United States into Mexico, and included among these were Davy Crockett and William Barrett Travis and Jim Bowie and a lot of others.
But they were settling in Mexico.
They understood this was a foreign country they were moving into, and Santa Ana or the Mexican government, generally speaking, would require immigrants to come in to become Mexican citizens.
And so, yes, I'm sure there were those that were thinking, oh my gosh, this could later become part of the United States.
But generally speaking, people understood when they were moving into Texas, this was Mexican land.
This was Mexican sovereignty.
So they began resisting this centralization of power, and that culminates in the Battle of the Alamo, where, by the way, Texas had still not declared independence.
In fact, if you see the movie The Alamo with John Wayne, you'll see they raise a flag that's not the Texas flag.
I think it says 1836 on it or something, but it was not a flag of revolution.
But sometime during that period of time, whether it's at the siege itself or right after the Battle of the Alamo, the Texans declare independence.
And so Santa Ana, of course, has killed everybody at the Alamo, but the Alamo resistance bought time for Sam Houston, who was trying to rally an army over in the eastern part of Texas.
So Santa Ana starts going after them.
And this was, of course, after he had massacred everybody at Goliad, Fannin and his troops.
So it looked like the resistance was going to be absolutely quelled and quashed, but Houston caught Santa Ana siestaing on one Sunday afternoon and turned his troops around and conducted a surprise attack on the Mexican army and defeated them soundly and arrested, took Santa Ana into captivity.
So now the guy's captive.
He's president of the country.
He's commander in chief.
And the Texans extract an agreement from him, agreeing that Texas will be an independent country.
It now establishes independence from Mexico, and in which the Rio Grande, rather than the Nueces River, will be the boundary line.
Now the reason this is important is because the Nueces sits far north of the Rio Grande.
I don't know the exact mileage, but it's probably about 70 miles north of the Rio Grande.
Both rivers run parallel to each other.
And so Santa Ana agrees and signs this agreement.
But there's one problem, that under Mexican law, in order for a treaty to be valid, it was no different from American law.
The Mexican Congress would have to ratify it.
If the Mexican Congress doesn't ratify it, it's not valid, and everybody understood that.
So under the previous situation in Mexico, Texas being a province, its border was the Nueces River, the river north of the Rio Grande.
Okay, so that's the situation.
You've got Texas declaring independence.
You've got Santa Ana president agreeing to this, but he's under duress.
He's under captivity.
Mexican Congress never goes along with this.
This is around 1836.
And so you've got a situation where Texas thinks it's independent, but Mexico doesn't recognize it.
It says, no, you're still part of our country.
And then you've got a treaty that really isn't valid under the law of Mexico or the United States.
So during this period of time, you start hearing talk of annexation, where the Texans say, we want to be part of the United States.
Mexico kept threatening the United States, if you do this, we will consider this an act of war.
Well, they end up doing it, and I forget the exact year, but I think it's around 1845.
So Texas was an independent nation for some nine years, nine, ten years or so.
But I think it was 1846 when they annexed Texas.
But during this period of time when they annexed Texas, there's talk about buying parts of Mexico, major parts of Mexico.
The U.S. government is talking about this and makes overtures to Mexico that, look, we want to buy California.
We want to buy New Mexico.
We've already annexed Texas.
Well, the Mexicans were already really upset over the annexation problem.
And they were certainly in no mood to be selling the huge swath of their country.
And they had a lot of political turmoil.
There was like a numerous presence during this period of time.
Well, this is what the Democrats were really about, was getting California, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And so during this period of time around 1840, 1845 or so, Polk comes into office.
He's the president of the United States, and he authorizes these overtures to buy these areas from Mexico.
Mexico says, no, we're not going to sell.
So what does Polk do?
Well, he does what a lot of rulers do.
He provokes a war.
I mean, he deliberately and intentionally starts a war in order to take the land away from a country that had refused to sell it.
Okay, how did he do this?
Well, he tells Mexico that the real border here of Texas, which is now a state, is not the Nueces River.
It's the Rio Grande.
And they explained to him, well, no, our Congress never ratified this.
Well, this doesn't stop Polk because he wants a war.
So he decides to send American troops down to what is essentially Brownsville today at the tip of Texas, southern tip of Texas.
Well, and this is, if I remember right, this is like the day that the ink was dry in the U.S. Senate, that Texas was now part of the union from that treaty being ratified.
And they just immediately sent U.S. troops all the way to the disputed southern border.
I think so.
I don't have the exact dates, but I think you're right.
They wasted no time whatsoever in picking this fight, at least.
Yeah, and he deliberately sends them there to provoke the reaction because, you see, Mexico's position was, not only do we not accept the annexation of Texas, but even if that were an established fact, it has to be the Nueces River that's the boundary because that treaty was never ratified by our Congress that made the Rio Grande the southern boundary.
So Polk knows this, so he deliberately puts some troops down there in Brownsville, which into Mexican eyes, and really the eyes of the law, is Mexican territory, Mexican land.
So he's effectively invaded this country under the pretense that, oh no, this land is in dispute.
And so the Mexicans decide to attack.
I mean, they're now faced with this fait accompli.
Do they let a foreign army sit on their land, or do they attack?
And they attacked, and it was with a big army that they attacked a small contention of troops, killed a bunch of them, captured a bunch of them.
Well, it's worth pointing out here, too, I think that the war was an absolute disaster, right?
And a bunch of guys died of all sorts of illnesses, and half the American casualties or more were from the flu or worse.
You know, I saw something the other day on Lou Rockwell's blog, where the comparison, I think, was pretty clear to the mass murder there at Fort Hood, that during the Mexican War, there were mostly Irish and German immigrants in the U.S. Army who were Catholics, who switched sides during the war because of the atrocities being committed against the Catholic Church and Catholic symbols, the raping of women, and horrible atrocities.
And they ended up fighting on the side of the Mexicans because they identified, of course, you know, as people do, their self-identity is tied up with other identities, such as their religion, state nationalism, and all those kinds of things.
And in this case, they said, no, we're not going to have you desecrate the Virgin Mary this way or whatever.
And they went and fought on the other side.
And, you know, this is not just something that was over in the blink of an eye, and it was no big deal, and, you know, we own Nevada happily ever after or something.
No, no.
I mean, after the Mexicans attacked there at Brownsville, that's what provoked Polk to go get a declaration of war from Congress.
And so he says, you know, the standard stuff, we've been attacked, we've been attacked.
And there were people who saw through this.
Among them was Abraham Lincoln, who strongly opposed this war of aggression.
And Henry David Thoreau, the philosopher, was famous for his refusal to pay taxes.
They were going to fund the war, and that was when, you know, they put him in jail.
And his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson comes and visits him and says, Henry, what are you doing in there?
And Thoreau responds, what are you doing out there?
So there was people that saw through what had happened, but you're right.
The war lasts, I think, somewhere around two years, and you've got military incursions in the northern part of Mexico.
You've got, of course, the government occupation, U.S. government occupation of the California area.
And then you've got Winfield Scott in kind of a fascinating military campaign, landing at Veracruz and marching his army to Mexico City.
And one of the fascinating things about his campaign is that it had many people who would become famous veterans of the Civil War some 20 years later, including Robert E. Lee and Grant and Stonewall Jackson and so forth.
And let me digress a minute to address what you were talking about, the San Patricios.
This really is a fascinating part of the story.
These were primarily Irish Americans.
They were Irish immigrants living in the United States or Irish citizens, Americans of Irish descent.
And they were part of this army, the U.S. army, and they had a crisis of conscience.
They looked at this the same way Lincoln did, Thoreau did.
This was just wrong.
It was morally wrong for the U.S. to be waging this war.
And they saw it as an anti-Catholic thing because Mexico was predominantly a Catholic country.
And they said, my gosh, we're just here killing Catholics in this war of aggression whose only purpose is to steal the land away from this country.
And so in this crisis of conscience as Catholics, they decided they just could not in good conscience fight with the U.S. government.
But they didn't just desert the army.
They took it one step further and decided they were going to fight on the side that they felt was morally right.
And so they did.
So that's either a measure of their treason or a measure of Polk's treason against what is good and true and what he should have been doing.
Well, it's a fascinating conflict between what is treason and what is patriotism because to this day there is a memorial in Mexico City to the San Patricios who consider these people great heroes and very courageous men who stood for their morals and their principles and their conscience.
But when Winfield Scott got to Mexico City and effectively conquered the country and ended up taking control of the capital, lo and behold, there are the San Patricios.
And he takes them into custody and proceeds to hang them for being traitors because they turned against their own government.
And there was no such thing as following your conscience according to the U.S. government.
But like I said, according to the Mexicans, these people are great, courageous heroes.
And they have a very nice memorial to the San Patricio Brigade down in Mexico City.
It's a fascinating story.
Well, and you know, too, what fascinates me is you have Abraham Lincoln, the peacenik.
It seems like the Republicans, as you said, Daniel Webster, and I know it's in your article anyway.
I'm not sure if you just mentioned this, sorry.
Henry Clay and the Whigs, what we now call the Northeastern big business Republican types, they were against this.
Lincoln himself, of course, was a railroad lobbyist.
That's how he got a job in the House of Representatives.
Then, as you said also, a lot of these guys ended up being the generals that led the Civil War later on.
But it also seems like the whole war between the states, whatever you want to call it, that happened in the 1860s, really was just blowback from the Mexican War, right?
Because wasn't the giant fight between whether slavery was going to be extended into the West and then whether the slave states would outnumber the free states by how many in the Senate and back and forth?
And that's what Bleeding Kansas was about and the Compromise of 1850 and all these things, right?
Well, my hunch is that there probably would have been a Civil War independent of what happened in the Mexican War.
But that was certainly part of the dispute as to whether this war was being waged in order to expand the slave states or how that was going to work, how they were going to resolve those issues.
But my hunch is that you probably would have ended up with a Civil War independently of it.
But who knows?
What I think is interesting is that the guys that ended up leading the militaries in the Civil War got their military experience in this Mexican War.
And that campaign down there to Veracruz is very, very interesting because here was an army thousands of miles away from its supply lines, landing there in ships and able to defeat the Mexican Army on the way there.
And Santa Ana, by the way, had returned by this time and had taken command of the army that was resisting this invasion.
And of course, he got beat again.
So in any event, the war is won when Winfield Scott takes over in Mexico City.
There's also a great story of these young Mexican soldiers, like teenagers, that were in a military school there that took a heroic stand against the American invaders.
And to this day, those young people are commemorated.
There's a big memorial to them in Mexico City.
I forget what their name is, but Los Edoes something or other.
But a bunch of young kids gave their lives in this battle.
So in any event, Winfield Scott takes over Mexico City.
It's effectively a surrender, but not formally because I think Santa Ana had absconded by that time.
And so they enter into the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a monumental treaty in terms of its significance to the United States and Mexico because, like I said at the start of this conversation, that treaty enabled the United States to effectively absorb the entire northern half of Mexico or more than the northern half, and that includes California.
It includes New Mexico, of course Texas, parts of Colorado.
And Arizona.
Arizona, along with all the customs and traditions and city names.
I mean, it's not a coincidence that the cities are called Los Angeles and San Francisco and San Diego, El Paso.
These are all Spanish names because this was a Mexican-Spanish speaking country.
Well, and they weren't – you mentioned earlier about how they were sort of assimilated into – they were just given a choice, either go to Mexico or become American citizens, and how many chose to be American citizens.
But it didn't all just work out fine from there either.
I mean, a lot of times the court would say, oh, you're Mexican?
Well, forget your property rights.
We're turning all your stuff over to our friends and that kind of thing.
And the people who had been of Spanish and Indian ancestry, the Mexican-Mexicans who lived in that northern part of Mexico, they basically got manifest destiny right out of their property too, even after the war, after they supposedly were given the rights of citizens.
They were more like Palestinians in the West Bank.
Well, there was tremendous abuse.
There's no doubt about it.
But what was interesting is that for many, many years, decades, there was completely open borders between the two countries.
I mean, free movements of people back and forth.
Mexicans would cross the border into what was formerly their country and open up businesses, go get jobs.
Nobody worried about, well, what's your citizenship?
Well, you know, we ought to give a shout-out to the Navajo too.
This land didn't really belong to Mexico to sell, and for the most part, it's sort of like Napoleon selling Louisiana.
What are you talking about?
We can look back at that now and think, I mean, ultimately, aside from the tragedy, it's ridiculous to think that Santa Ana can surrender all this land.
It does not belong to him.
He's just some state dictator.
How can he claim property rights over the people who actually lived there and always did?
Well, that just goes back to the laws of conquest and war and so forth.
It's an entirely different subject we could spend a lot of time on, but as a practical matter, the U.S. took jurisdiction over this land, and it had tremendous consequences, as we all know, for this country and for Mexico.
I mean, even today, that debate is still alive in Mexico.
I forget what they call it, but they see it as the U.S. invasion of their country.
Sure.
Well, you know, it's hard to fly.
I just flew to New Hampshire and back a week or so ago to give this talk, and it's pretty hard to ignore that.
America has been an empire long before they ever stole the Philippines.
This is an empire.
There ain't no way to turn the land between New Hampshire and Los Angeles into a limited constitutional republic.
That's why it's not one.
It had to be an empire in order to gain all this territory itself, you know, in the first place.
Right.
Well, I mean, that was part of that manifest destiny stuff, where, oh, well, this is our destiny to control the land from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean.
What was significant about the Spanish-American War, of course, was that that was the first time the U.S. extended this empire beyond the continental view of the United States and wanted to become like the Spanish Empire and extend its dominion to all over the world.
And, of course, they did that with Cuba.
They did it with the Philippines, and that was the start.
I mean, that led to World War I and World War II.
But you're right.
The roots are planted way back in the mid-1800s, if not earlier.
Jacob Hornberger, you're one hell of a great history teacher.
Thank you.
Hey, thank you.
It's great to be here, Scott.
Everybody, that's Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future Freedom Foundation.
The website is fff.org, and I believe you can find the blog at just fff.org slash blog.
I think at least it'll redirect you to where you need to go there.
And it's a great website full of great writers.
You're James Bovard's, you're Anthony Gregory's, you're Sheldon Richman's.
It's the best of the best, so go and check that out, fff.org.
